


The Man and The Monster

by thefairyknight



Series: Raising Sarah [1]
Category: Terminator Genisys (2015)
Genre: Family, Gen, Kidfic, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairyknight/pseuds/thefairyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well what did your parents call you?” she wonders.</p>
<p>“I have no parents. I am a machine, constructed in a facility that does not yet exist,” he replies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man and The Monster

 

 

The Man From the Dock doesn’t give Sarah his name.

She asks him, once she stops shaking, piping up from the passenger seat of his truck. They’re driving. She doesn’t know where they’re going, she realizes. Not towards town, where there are police stations and fire trucks and ambulances. But away from the… the thing at the lake, at least.

The Man doesn’t look at Sarah.

“I am a model T-800 Terminator,” he says. “I have no name.”

It’s a strange enough thing to say that it distracts her from her thoughts of fire and water, and what she can’t quite comprehend having lost. It’s too big. She feels like if she stops to look at it, she’ll drown, as surely as if she’d stopped treading water in the lake.

“Well what did your parents call you?” she wonders.

“I have no parents. I am a machine, constructed in a facility that does not yet exist,” he replies.

_I have no parents._

Sarah stares at the road, and doesn’t ask any more questions for a while.

 

~

 

Sarah is tired and hungry and heavy, so heavy, and she bursts into tears at some point she doesn’t quite recall, weeping into her arms while The Man just stares at her.

“We must keep moving,” he says. “The T-1000 is still in pursuit.”

“I want my mommy,” Sarah insists, choking, wiping at her cheeks and her still-damp hair.

“Your maternal unit has been terminated,” he tells her, without any hint of sympathy or hesitation. “She is no longer available.”

Sarah cries harder, and then harder again, weeping on the concrete ground of the gas station until a nervous teenager approaches and asks what seems to be the problem. He kneels next to Sarah and offers her a tentative pat on the back, and Sarah looks up with wide, wet eyes, just in time for The Man to bark at them.

“Get down!”

Then there is more fire, and blood, and screaming. Metal-water. Sarah is shaking again, blood on her arms, staring at the teenage gas station attendant who it belongs to, who is bleeding, bleeding so much, and then up, up, to The Man and The Monster. _Bang, bang, bang_ go the bullets from the man’s gun, and _swoosh_ goes the Monster’s gleaming arm, cutting through jacket and flesh.

But there is no rush of blood.

There is a screech of metal, instead, as The Man uses The Monster’s own weapon to fling it into the gas station fire. Then he is picking Sarah up and carrying her into the truck, strong arms never faltering under the whole weight of her, and she can see where his jacket is torn, where there is a little blood but more, where there are flecks of metal.

Like the inside of a car.

Sarah curls into him until he puts her down to drive, and even then she keeps one hand on him, staring out of the windows while her mind plays an endless loop of blood and metal, water and fire, and sightless eyes staring back at her.

 

~

 

When she wakes up, it’s dark out.

She feels dizzy. Her throat is dry. So is the blood on her arms, flaking and itchy. The Man – who isn’t really a man, she knows, from what he’s said and what she’s seen, although she thinks she might have known it from the very beginning, somehow – is still driving.

“I’m thirsty,” she mumbles, quietly.

The Man glances towards her.

“You require regular refueling,” he says. “We will obtain food and water.”

She nods, and the next time they stop, it’s at a diner. She knows this place. Her parents like to stop here on the way to the cabin. It’s bright and cheery, and the waitresses always give Sarah something to colour while she waits for her food. Mom likes their pancakes.

This time, when they walk in, one of the waitresses drops the coffee pot she’s carrying.

“Good lord!” she exclaims.

Sarah startles at the sound of the crash, staring at the dark, spilled coffee, gripping The Man’s hand so hard her knuckles turn white.

Then there’s a flurry of voices. Questions. The Man says something. Sarah is staring at the broken coffee pot until she hears a soothing voice, speaking directly to her.

“Sarah,” the waitress says. “It’s Sarah, right, sweetheart?”

She’s standing several feet away, and her eyes flit over to The Man. She looks pale and afraid. But when her gaze turns back to Sarah, she smiles, big and forced, and reaches out a hand.

“Why don’t you just come over to me now, and we’ll get you fixed up. Okay?”

She doesn’t look anything like Sarah’s mother, not really, but she’s the right age, with chipped nail polish and wide hips and curls in her hair. Sarah sees the blaze of a cabin exploding, she sees the gas station attendant, lying on the ground, and she’s too scared to move, to do anything other than look up at The Man.

The Man looks back down at her, his expression steady as ever.

“Do not exit the building,” he says.

Something in Sarah unclenches, just a little, and she lets go of his hand and goes over to the waitress, who doesn’t sit her at a table, but instead whisks her swiftly into a back room she’s never seen before.

“Honey, where are your parents?” she asks, urgently.

_Where are your parents?_

Sarah opens her mouth, and instead of an answer, the most ungodly sound of misery she’s ever heard escapes her.

Two seconds later the door they came in by is being ripped off of its hinges. There’s more shouting, panic, the waitress grabs her but then The Man takes her instead, clutching her to his chest, and he draws a gun and she shrieks into his neck, _no, no, no,_ please no, _no more blood._

“Don’t hurt anybody!” she begs.

He stops.

He doesn’t.

 

~

 

They’re being chased.

Metal-water monsters and police and the whole world, it seems. They take cars that don’t belong to them, they take food and clothes and other things that don’t belong to them, while Sarah feels like she’s swimming through a nightmare, her only constant The Man and his steady, unchanging expression, and the relentless feeling of being pursued.

“It wants to kill me,” she says, riding in the cab of a dusty blue truck that they took from a church parking lot.

“Yes,” The Man says.

“How come?” Sarah asks, pressing her forehead against the cool glass window beside her. The highway flies by, trees and signs, zip, zip, zip in the twilight. It feels like ages since she slept in a bed, or read a story, or ate at a proper sit-down table. She thinks maybe those things are gone with her parents. It seems like they should be gone with them, really.

Then The Man starts telling her about the future.

 

~

 

Sarah sneaks out of the gas station bathroom at their next stop, steals a bike, and starts pedalling.

The Man catches up to her in about ten minutes.

“This is an inefficient mode of transportation,” he says, easily keeping pace with her, no matter how hard she pedals. Sometimes he falls a little behind, but never by much, and he never stops moving. He never gets tired.

Sarah does.

“Go away,” she tells him.

“I cannot do that. It is my imperative that I protect you.”

“I don’t want you to! I hate you and I hate your stupid John Connor!” she seethes. She doesn’t even want to think about it, this awful thing, the world ending and monsters swimming through time, rising up out of the bottom of boats to kill her not even for herself, but for a baby she’s going to have in the future – because of a soldier she falls in love with, a soldier who dies, and didn’t her mother always say that there was nothing quite so terrible as falling in love with a soldier? Didn’t she say there was nothing as hard as raising a baby all alone?

She pedals until the front tire of the bike crashes into a rock, and wobbles, and she goes careening off the side and lands on her knees.

They scrape in the dirt.

She gathers up fistfuls of it and fling them aside. She kicks the bike, and then she kicks it again, until her feet hurt and her lungs burn.

Then she screams.

“I do not understand the purpose of this activity,” The Man says.

Sarah doesn’t know how to explain frustration to him.

She decides not to try.

  
~

 

The next time she runs away, she takes their stolen car.

And promptly crashes it into a tree.

“You are not yet tall enough to drive,” The Man tells her, after pulling her out of the cab and examining her for injuries, deeming them ‘superficial’ after a moment. He doesn’t even sound mad. Sarah never thought she would miss being scolded.

She stares at the curl of smoke rising out of the mangled engine, and after a minute, just nods in agreement.

 

~

 

The Monster catches up with them at a motel, where The Man finally takes them after Sarah starts complaining about her hair getting tangled and looking all like a rat’s nest, and not being able to brush her teeth or have a bath or _anything_ other than wash her face in gas station bathroom sinks, on their road trip that feels like it’s never going to end.

The man at the desk looks at them strangely when he gives them their key. Sarah scrubs and scrubs and brushes and brushes in the bathroom, and then drops onto the bed, out like a light almost as soon as her head touches the pillow.

She wakes up to the sound of shattering glass, and the blast of a gun.

“Run, Sarah Connor!” The Man shouts at her.

Sarah dashes through the door, over broken glass that cuts at her feet, her heart thudding a thousand miles and minute. She runs and runs until she realizes that The Man isn’t coming with her, and when she looks back at the motel, it looks like a boat, sitting on the lake, dawn behind it and the red curtains in the windows like blood spilling over wood.

There are crashes and shots and bangs, and then finally The Man walks out, and Sarah breathes.

“Sarah Connor?” he calls.

“Here!” she calls back, but when he looks towards her it feels like something is _wrong_ , and she finds her hurt feet are already moving her backwards and away when he lifts his gun and points it at her.

The Man – the real one – comes barrelling through the wall of the motel, then, and tackles the imposter.

The gun goes clattering the pavement, skids and stops halfway between Sarah and the two struggling figures. She scrambles for it, trips and scrapes her elbows, but all she can think is that if she’s holding it, then someone else _isn’t_ , and when she grabs it she tries to shoot. She does. It’s harder than she thought, the metal fierce against her fingers, and when she finally fires she misses her target by a mile and almost drops the gun again when it hurts her hands.

The Monster flings The Man out into the road, and then advances on her, fast and fluid like the metal-water he’s made of. One shining arm, sharpened to a point, comes at her. She squeezes the trigger for the second time, and this time it hits, makes him stagger a step, leaves a mark like a gleaming silver dollar over his stomach.

Sarah wonders if that’s all she’s ever going to be, in the end, hurt hands and blood on the pavement and one tiny mark that’s disappearing as fast as she made it.

Another shot, from the road, big and loud enough to make her eardrums quake, and The Monster’s head shatters, distorted silver gaping from its neck.

“Run!” The Man commands her again.

Sarah races down the road, gun in her hands, leaving bloody footprints until her legs finally give out on her and she collapses.

That’s how the State Trooper finds her.

 

~

 

The police ask her a lot of questions. About where she’s been. About what happened at the cabin. They have a drawing of The Man. An officer with a bushy moustache and a kind face, who says he has a little girl just her age, asks about her bruises and scrapes and the gun they found her holding, asks if the man in the drawing hurt her.

“No,” she says. “It was the other one.”

Some part of her thinks that she shouldn’t tell him the whole story, that he won’t believe it. She’d have thought it was made-up, too, and she’s a kid, and she knows kids are much better at believing in things than adults ever are. But the police officer is so nice, and warm. He brings her a chocolate milk and a colouring book, and promises he won’t get mad or laugh at her no matter what she says.

So she tells him. About the cabin, and The Monster, and John Connor and Kyle Reese, the end of the world and everything.

The police officer keeps his word. He doesn’t laugh or get angry, or do anything other than ask questions, and listen when she answers. Sarah doesn’t cry. She’s proud of that. She gets through it all, through the lake and the road trip and the fight at the motel, and she doesn’t cry, not once.

“Do you believe me?” she asks.

And finally, the comfort of having someone to listen to her starts to fray apart into icy regret, because she can tell that he doesn’t.

“I believe that you’re telling me what _you_ believe,” he says.

That’s when Sarah finally cries, angry hot tears slicking down her cheeks.

They land in her chocolate milk.

 

~

 

They send her to a facility with nice people who have sad smiles, and bars on the windows, and only soft toys to play with. They give her crayons and she draws pictures of the dock, of The Man, and of The Monster, using up all the grey in sharp, angry points, like the teeth of a giant shark. They ask her lots of questions, about dreams and reality, and lies and imagination. She crawls under the bed to sleep, listening to her heart beat _thump thump thump_ behind her ribs, and waiting for the windows to break until she’s too exhausted to keep her eyes open anymore.

She’s rewarded for her vigilance her third night there, when she hears a grinding sound, and sees the shadow of a hand twisting the bars out of the bedroom window. She squeezes back, close to the wall, trying not to breathe, trying not to let her heart beat too loud.

Hands remove the glass from the window next.

Sarah thinks of the other girls, sleeping in their beds, and wonders if they’re going to die, too. She squeezes her eyes shut and wishes she knew what to do, wishes she could make it _stop._

Boots land on the floor. It’s not a quiet sound. It’s a heavy _thunk_ , and that makes her pause, makes her opens her eyes again, because The Monster is always quiet until it doesn’t have to be anymore.

Slowly, she dares to edge a little bit closer to the end of the bed, and looks at the boots – familiar boots – and for a second she is seeing them through the slats of a dock, and she remembers how to breathe.

She remembers, a second later, The Monster looking like The Man, outside the motel, calling her name.

The steps move closer, and Sarah finds herself caught between fear and elation when they stop, wondering if it is death or salvation, but when a familiar face leans down, somehow she just _knows._

“Sarah Connor?” he asks, too loud for a room full of sleeping children.

“Shhh!” she replies, but the damage is done; one of the other girls wakes up and screams.

Sarah leaves the facility tucked underneath The Man’s arm, as people shout and an alarm goes off and police cars chase after them until they lose them down winding, twisty roads, and change cars half a dozen times, until she falls asleep in the backseat of a station wagon while the radio sings soothing nonsense at her.

Beds don’t feel safe anymore anyway.

 

~

 

Hiding is tricky work, Sarah finds.

If it’s too obvious that you’re hiding from something, then people start looking too closely, and asking questions, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. When they see a big, mean-looking man and a sullen, scared little girl, they think something’s wrong.

It’s not their fault. Something _is_ wrong, after all. But if they try to help, they’ll just make things worse.

And as much as The Man tries, as much as he says he was built for infiltration, he’s terrible at it.

So Sarah has to learn how to do it for both of them.

She shoplifts sparkly barrettes and colourful headbands and glasses without lenses in them, daydreams she’s shopping with her mother and the game is to find the most cheerful clothes imaginable, things that are bright and sweet and only make people think of happiness. She learns to smile a new smile and laugh a new laugh, giggling and girlish, higher than she ever goes for real, because people think that’s how little girls should laugh. She remembers places that her father told her about, in his fascination with abandoned buildings and ghost towns, figures out the difference between hiding from someone who is looking for you already, and convincing people who don’t know any better not to bother looking in the first place.

People react oddly when she calls The Man her friend, they get suspicious when they see an adult man with a child he doesn’t own. But the idea of calling him her father, her dad, leaves ashes in her mouth, makes her think of the real deal and wipes too much of the smile from her eyes.

‘Uncle’ doesn’t work much better, especially when she struggles to find a name to go with it, stuttering over her words and making them conspicuous all over again.

Then one rainy morning the lady at a rest stop kiosk asks where they’re headed so close to the start of the school year. Sarah smiles her sunny-fake-smile at her, bubble-gum sweet, and it just comes tumbling out.

“Pops and I are just heading home!” she chirps.

It’s ridiculous, like the bright pink nail polish he lets her put on him when she’s bored, like wearing her purple pansy dress while he corrects her grip on a hand gun, like arms that never get tired of holding her until she asks to be put down.

“Pops,” she repeats, carefully, when they’re on the road again.

He looks over at her.

It sticks.

 

 


End file.
